By Joanne Bailey-Boorsma
joanne@wktv.org
Every story has a starting point. For Jon Wesley Convington’s film “Black Man,” it started when he was hired by the Muskegon Museum of Art to do a five-minute video loop featuring interviews of African-American males in the community to accompany the MMA’s 2018 – 2019 Winter exhibition “Sons: Seeing the Modern African American Male.”
“I started into the project and suddenly realized there was so much more,” Covington said. “Five minutes turned into 50 hours of film which became an hour and half documentary.”
That documentary, “Black Men,” will be screened Wednesday, Feb. 26, at 7 p.m. at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, 2 W. Fulton St. Tickets are $5 for UICA members and $10 for non-members.
The film features interviews from 36 African-American males ages 21 – 91, who all hail from the West Michigan area. The men candidly discuss about loves, lives, losses, longings and their America.
“What amazed me was the transparency and the emotions,” Covington said of the film, adding the interviews are like nothing people have seen before.
Just from the four-and-half minute trailer, the intensity of these men’s stories can be felt. One interviewee laughs his way through a story as the tears roll down his face, another, you can feel his pain through a simple glance at the camera. And a third makes a profound statement that shows just how similar we all are in our wants and desires.
“We are in America and we all want the same thing for ourselves and our kids, and that’s opportunity.”
The final cut of “Black Men” was screened at the 2020 Martin Luther King Jr. program on Jan. 20 at the Muskegon Museum of Art. The film has been screened at several venues and featured at festivals, most recently the Pan African Film and Art Festival in Los Angeles and received awards from the Capital City Black Film Festival. The film is scheduled for a second Grand Rapids screening through Spectrum Health on March 19.
For more about the documentary “Black Men” and other showtimes, visit the Facebook page.
About Jon Wesley Covington
Covington is a Muskegon native who now lives in the Cascade area. He is a filmmaker who has worked on a number of projects including the iparticipate campaign spearheaded by Michelle Obama. He also is the founder of the literacy initiative Men of Color Read, which has recently partnered with Kent District Library.
